Development of Sports Team Management Apps: Essential and Extra Features

Sport has always been one of the most popular and money making industries in the world. You will be surprised to know that sports market in North America is expected to reach $75.7 billion by the end of 2020.

Pro sports generates most of its revenues from through sponsorships and by selling broadcasting rights. All these money are brought by spectators, sports lovers, and businesses. Ordinary people who actually pay for ads, watch TV, attend games, and buy sports apparels are paying for sports.

For example, last year the average cost of a 30-second ad spot during Super Bowl was around $5 million. Obviously, not all businesses are able to pay for such TV commercial. Hopefully, there are cheaper ways to promote your products to sports lovers. Sports Team Management Apps is one of them.

Needless to say that sports apps have cheaper rates. In addition, they provide advertisers with hundred times better-targeted audience. No surprise that such kind of app can make a juicy revenue stream to its owner. On top of that, team management apps can monetize through subscriptions, which makes this app category a lucrative spot in the growing app market.

Best Examples of Sports Team Management Apps

Despite the bright prospects the competition in sports segment is quite low compared to other app market categories. We can list only a few appealing app for sports teams that worth mentioning:

• Teamstuff – A multi award-winning team management app. Teamstuff is tailored specifically for school teams. It boasts clear UI and all-necessary functionality to manage small-sized teams.
• Instateam – Instateam is more about communication and messaging than sports. It focuses on keeping all team members together, informed and organized. But it lucks training/activity features.
• TeamSnap – The app claims to have 15 million users in 196 different countries worldwide. It is focused on sports team training organization. Still, TeamSnap needs a bit more extra features to shine.
• Teamer – The application is created to meet the needs of a very specific audience: corporate teams. It could be even better if focused on offices competitions and corporate league. Still, Teamer boasts about 2 million users worldwide.

Essential Tools to Manage Sports Team

Organizing team events can be quite difficult. Contacting players and gathering responses is never easy. Last minutes changes to the events always cause confusion. Shared information spreads up through the multiple apps. And on top of it, team manager should deal with finance and payments. That’s why, in essence, sports team must be aimed to take on hassle out of organizing sports teams or social groups.

The simplest way to make it right is by developing a social app that will hold account details of every team member and connect people to each other. In essence, by building a social app you make a head start in sports team management industry.

Further on, you can build any sport features on top of your social app. Players want to share team statistics? Done! Upload photos and documents? Any social app can make it! Want to share an event calendar? Here you go!

• Groups & Individual Chats – Team games are very depending on communication, both during training and on the playing field. This communication tools is must-have feature for any team management application.
• Score Table – Scoring functionality will be especially useful for amateur teams. Such teams usually play corporate matches and lack an independent system to track their progress inside corporate tournament. Plus, every coach knows that the best way to keep the team motivated is to show the results.
• Workout Planner – This feature may suit for schools and professional sports teams, where trainers pay more attention to each player and develop personalized exercise plans.
• Event Management – Event reminders can be used in numerous ways. You can notify team members about upcoming training, or share events in social media, or you can serve targeted ads and notifications.
• Training Schedule – This feature is a must if you’re targeting amateur teams. Unlike professional and school teams, amateur teams are extremely “unstable”. Someone may leave, someone gets sick. A clear schedule will help coaches coordinate training and keep a high attendance rate. On the other hand, you’ll get a better retention rate as long as users will get back to your app to check their training schedule.
• Chief Control Panel – This section is something similar to admin panel. From here your coaches will keep track of attendance rate, coordinate team efforts, track players’ performance and create group chats.
• Finance Section – You should definitely consider adding this section to your sports team management software. From here managers can easily allocate team budget, keep records of purchases, and even access an in-app inventory store. Finance section may also include a Payment Gateway allowing team members to transfer money without leaving your mobile app.

Extra Sports Team Management App Features

It must be acknowledged that building a yet another social media app won’t get you anywhere. That’s why you should consider adding extra features on top of it.

• Book a Sports Ground – This unique feature can make your app irreplaceable. Especially if your audience is amateur teams without a permanent place for training. Plus, you can additionally monetize your app with the help of this feature by promoting sports grounds and taking a fee for each transaction.
• Emergency Button – Parents and school teams will adore this function. It will reassure parents that their kids will be in good hands, even if something bad happens. Emergency button can be paired with emergency contacts list in order to send notifications to all interested parties in case of accident.
• Activity Monitor – If you intend to create an app for professionals, you should take one step further and pair it with wearable devices. This move will open up a whole field of new possibilities. You can integrate in-depth athletes performance statistics, build individual workouts on top of it, and automatically log activity of each team member.
• Stuff Duties – It must be acknowledged that the success of the team depends not only on the coach and players but also on the supportive stuff. Your app should take into account these duties and people who keep the team a well-oiled machine.
• Inventory Manager – Sometimes having a spare bottle of juice is priceless. Especially, when your teammates have forgotten to take it. A simple checklist functionality will ensure your users will be well-prepared for a training and make them get back to your app more often.
• Carpooling List – This is a very popular option often found in team management apps. And it works just like it should be. It allows team members to coordinate and travel together in the same car.
• Diet Calendar – Extremely useful feature that can give you extra points from professionals. Just make sure to develop a calendar with autofill functionality so that coaches could compose a diet calendar for each team member in minutes instead of hours.

Bottom Line

There are tons of extra features for sports team management apps. The list can go on. For instance, you can develop mobile apps tailored specifically to certain sports. Baseball team management app, football team management app, cycling team management app, etc.

On the other hand, most of the existing applications share same weak spots. They lack clear UI and straightforward use cases. And you should keep in mind that professional coaches are too conservative to adopt such apps. In the meantime, keep in mind that sport is about fun, and you should build an app that will embrace it.